Chapter Text
Blaise
He does not remember when the light became a blade. At first, it was warmth – the kind that touched the edges of his soul and promised absolution. Then, it began to burn, but he remembers the Aurors calling it cleansing.
They always do, when they mean destruction.
The room where they kept him was made of glass and magical wards, old sanctums repurposed into prisons. The Light's magic lingered in every surface – sharp and sterile in an odd way. It smelled of salt and ashes, with a faintsweetness of sanctified decay. The Aurors, and so many other wizards, spoke over his body as though he were not really here, not really a man. Words like containment, purification, and residual soulmagic. He remembers laughter once – the soft, pitiful kind. Someone said that it was mercy he was still breathing.
He would have killed them all if he could have moved. If he could have opened his mouth. If he could have opened his eyes.
Instead, he lay still beneath the shimmer of the curse – the Light coiled inside him like a serpent of fire, tightening whenever he tried to breathe. It did not kill; it simply unmade. It hollowed him out one nerve at a time, leaving enough mind to know what was being taken. He saw the shape of his own body blur, magic burning through his veins in slow, exquisite ruin.
They said they fought for good. For the "right" side. They said they fought against monsters. He wanted to tell them: monsters are made, not born.
Time dissolved and days bled into years, or maybe hours – he could no longer tell. The air itself became his clock, marked only by the rhythm of footsteps, the clink of glass, the soft spells of medimages.
Sometimes, he dreamt of the sea.
He would see it behind his eyelids –dark, endless, swallowing the horizon. In those dreams, he was free, if only because there was nothing left of him to bind.
One day, however, the atmosphere changed. Someone gasped – a sound of surprise, not fear – and light flooded the chamber. Real light this time, he could feel it on his skin, so different from the cursed brilliance of purification. I was something gentler. Like rainlight.
He remembers the taste of it: cold and clean.
He crawled.
Or perhaps he only thought he crawled – his body was a map of half-healed wounds, his magic threadbare and flickering. But he found the door, found the world waiting on the other side, and fell into it.
In truth, he couldn't move an inch.
But the sea was there anyway, just as he had dreamt.
He lay beneath layers of enchantment, skin marked with sigils that pulsed faintly with each dying beat of the curse. Somewhere deep in his chest, magic moved like blood – sluggish, venomous and stubbornly alive.
Sometimes –often– he wonders if he were already dead.
Sometimes – often– he hoped he was.
Then the sound that had brought the light came closer – footsteps through water, the hiss of rain against glass. It was a different rhythm, slower.
He felt the faint tremor in the magic of the room, the shift in the wards as they recognised someone new. For a heartbeat, panic flooded his chest – another medimage, another Light-bringer, came to bleed him dry of what darkness remained.
Then, a voice – low and uncertain. Words he couldn't quite follow. His mind drifted in and out, pulled under by pain and exhaustion. He catches a single word as though through water.
"Zabini?"
It took him a moment to remember the sound of his own name. He tried to move, but failed. A tremor –a finger twitching once against the sheets. They were touching him now, shifting the magic around his body. He wanted to fight, to snarl, to curse them all into dust, but all that escaped him was a flicker of air, the smallest echo of life.
Still, it was enough.
Magic stirred weakly at the edge of his awareness – a spark of instinctive defence, of rage barely tethered to breath. The serpent of Light inside him tightened once, furious, then stilled again. Through the fog, he heard a promise spoken close to his bed, a voice unfamiliar, yet he knew he had heard it before.
"Pack him up. He's coming with me."
For the first time in years, the wards trembled with uncertainty. He did not know this man, but he knew one thing – the cage the Light had put him in was breaking. Something inside him – something dark and enduring – began to wake.